This blog is maintained by the Virginia Atheists & Agnostics at the University of Virginia. The views represented herein are intended to inspire conversation, debate, and perhaps most importantly, free inquiry.

Monday, October 19, 2009

This thread has asploded ...

Please continue any and all arguments about the scientific method, the existence and nature of God, the limits of technology, and attestations to alien abduction, ghost stories, and near-death experiences here. Thank you. Have at.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

The scientific method is flawed if only because we are trying to figure out something that we don't understand so we have to formulate a theory based on observable data but our theories are only as good as our ability to create the theories which for 99% of humanity is terrible. The scientific method is fundamentally flawed in the most basic sense, and anyone involved will tell you it may be the most efficient way of figuring things out these days but it has it's flaws. -Anthony

I was asked to repost my comments here. Like a good sheep, I'm doing it. =)

And for the record, I'm a grad student in particle phenomenology at Johns Hopkins now with an additional extensive background in relativity. I feel it's good to get that out there in case anyone wants to question my authority on these points.

----------------Alright, I've been deleting 99% of the 193481293489283492834 ridiculousmessages that have been going back and forth across the mailing list, butI just happened to read the last sentence of this email and felt thefacepalm sting enough that I feel a response is merited.

Okay, it's cool that we can always have this lovely "well, one day we'llhave the technology" principle to fall back on because for a good portionof human history this has been the case. Yes, perhaps one day we'll havevehicles that can travel close to the speed of light, but if I have tosuffer through one more "ftl rocketship" speculation I think I'm gonnaslap a bitch.

If something can propagate FTL - let's say a signal - then, thanks to themagic of Lorentz boosts in special relativity, we can always jump to areference frame in which someone receives the signal before it's sent.The signal can then be sent back to someone in the previous referenceframe in a similar manner and arrange everything so that if you sent thesignal, you could receive the return signal before you sent it in thefirst place. This leads to causal paradoxes: you could then in principlearrange for your father to be killed before you're born.

In general relativity, temporally-closed regions of space-time areadmissible solutions to the field equations, but they're always separated from non-closed regions via an impassable event horizon. Since onrelevant time scales the region of space-time in which we dwell isn'ttemporally closed, we must conclude we're not in one. And thus, suchsituations that lead to these causal paradoxes are inadmissible.

You might say "but maybe relativity is wrong!" Yes, it might not be 100%right, but this question deals more directly with what kind of geometryspace-time has. Relativity suggests that it's locally 'Minkowskian" -don't worry about the details, suffice it to say it just means inertialframes are related via Lorentz boosts and not just rotations. Even if itweren't quite Minkowskian - even if there were just a little mixingbetween Minkowskian and Euclidean geometries - such that these FTLrocketships could be possible, the results in particle physics andcosmological experiments would be RADICALLY different. Yes, there aretheories out there that consider modifications to the Minkowskian geometryof space-time (look up CPT symmetry breaking) but these would necessarilybe so god damn minute on the macroscopic scale that exploiting theseslight deviations would be literally impossible (think inter-moleculeinteractions of any sort simply being unable to stand up to the necessaryenergy and momentum densities - we're talking scales that could onlysupport hydrogen plasma as a state of matter at best).

So yeah, it's cool to think about, but unless you're ready to kill yourown father before you're born and convince you universe you didn't justtry to cheat it NO we will never ever ever ever ever ever have FTLtravel. Period. Nor will the aliens.

Wormholes are a different story...lol =P OH and I'm just talking abouttraveling locally FTL - globally doesn't count because it turns out to bequantum mechanically unstable.

All of the worst arguments I have heard can be rewritten: X is conceivable, therefore X is true. It is obvious that at least one person on the VAA discussion thread is ignorant of the logical leap involved in this sort of diarrhea. I would like to hear someone explain the leap and perhaps spark some discussion on possibility vs. plausibility. I can't bring myself to accept the shame involved in explaining something so fundamental to a fellow UVa student.

Research on NDE has been ongoing at the University of Virginia for over 40 years. There is more to it than you might think. Many hypotheses have been examined and discarded. There seem to be no easy explanations that fit with scientism (a materialistic worldview that all things can be explained by a scientific approach),

such as the patient being able to repeat conversations that took place between doctors out of earshot or describe objects only visible from the ceiling,

or

"Pam Reynolds described accurate and detailed visual perceptions of her brain surgery in which all the blood had been drained out of her body and her brain waves were totally flat." -Bruce Greyson, M.D., Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at UVA(http://www.aspsi.or/feat/life_after/tymn/bruce_greyson.htm)

On Oct 19, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Alexander Rohrer wrote:

You aren't dead until a certain number of things happen. Just because your heart stops beating, your brain is still working for what could feel like hours, which in reality could be 2 minutes. Everything you do -- everything you think -- is nothing more then biological reactions, created by the firing of neurotransmiters. I'm sorry, but your 'near-death experience' statement is just false. They don't exist -- only what your brain can show you does.